Tonight’s series finale of “How I Met Your Mother” brought to a close what was undoubtedly the most drawn-out meet-cute in television history—nine years and 208 episodes long, to be exact. In the show’s final hour, co-creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas tied up loose ends, tugged at our heartstrings, and dropped bombshells that left some fans wishing that Ted Mosby had never made it to the end of his long-winded love story.

The episode progressed in a series of warp-speed flash-forwards: After a whole season leading up to Barney Stinson and Robin Scherbatsky’s wedding, it couldn’t have been more than ten minutes into tonight’s episode before the pair announced their conscious uncoupling. Robin is now a jet-setting journalist—whose network apparently doesn’t have any foreign correspondents, since she’s reporting from a new country every week—and Barney feels dragged down by the constant travel and lack of hotel Wi-Fi (how is his blog supposed to take off under such conditions?!) After a fateful night in Argentina of fighting and drinking and fighting some more, they decide to get a divorce.

Meanwhile, Ted and the Mother—whose name, we find out, is Tracy McConnell—are finally together. On the night of the wedding and the eve of Ted’s planned move to Chicago, they finally meet at the Farhampton bus stop. It’s raining out and a wise, albeit somewhat creepy, woman prods Ted into talking to the beautiful bass player from the wedding band. Naturally, she’s carrying the same yellow umbrella that’s been popping up in “HIMYM” since 2007. And, as we know, Ted doesn’t move to Chicago.

“I met a girl,” he announces the next day to a flabbergasted Marshall and Lily. Marshall is skeptical, since by now Ted has fallen in love with half the population of Manhattan, but Lily sees that this time is different.

Flash forward to 2015 and he’s already planning their wedding: a Kardashian-worthy spectacle involving a 17th century castle and a hot air balloon exit. But these plans are on hold when Tracy announces that she’s pregnant. “When I get married, I kind of want to fit in to my dress,” she tells Ted. This isn’t too much of a shocker—after all, we’ve known the kids longer than we’ve known her—but soon we’ll learn that the pair doesn’t get married for another five years.

By that time, Lily and Marshall have three kids (the pace of this episode has Lily popping out a new baby after nearly every commercial break) and have grown out of the old apartment. Marshall has finally scored a judgeship after passing up the first offer to go to Italy and returning to the punishing world of corporate law for a few years.

Barney has been back to his old ways, figuring that, “If it wasn’t going to happen with Robin, it wasn’t going to happen.” But, after surpassing his “perfect week” (seven girls in seven days, that is) with a “perfect month,” he gets some earth-shattering news: number 31 is pregnant. Fast-forward again and we see him in the hospital holding his baby daughter Ellie, one of the few universal feel-good moments of the episode. It seems to turn Barney into a softie too, since soon he’s telling 20-somethings in mini-skirts, “Go home and call your parents.”

Robin has been pretty much out of the picture, other than a brief run-in at the newsstand with Ted and his adorable daughter (who calls her “bus lady” because her ads are plastered on the sides of public transit), but she makes a surprise appearance on the day of the wedding. At MacLaren’s, back where it all started, the gang raises a toast to Ted, “a man with more emotional endurance than anyone we know.”

As the episode draws to a close, we flash back once again to the night in the rain when Ted and the Mother met. They argue over the indestructible yellow umbrella and who owned it first, since both of them share the initials “TM”. We see a series of photographs of Christmas mornings and New Year’s Eves, and learn that at some point down the line, Tracy got very sick. In fact, when Ted finally finishes his story, she’s already been gone for six years.

After all that, his (now grown-up) daughter tells it like it is: “This is a story about how you’re totally in love with Aunt Robin!” So, with that settled, we’re left with the final shot of the series: Ted standing outside Robin’s window, holding the blue French horn. Turns out the Mother wasn’t really the point at all.

What did you think of tonight’s finale? Let us know in the comments below.

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